“Mrs. Nandha, you have clean bowled me.”
The next day Parvati introduces Krishan to her friends the Prekashs, the Ranjans, the Kumars, and the Maliks. She lays out the magazines like dhuris on the sun-warmed decking. The air is as still and heavy as poured metal this morning, pressing the traffic din and smoke down under a layer of high pressure. Parvati and her husband fought last night. They fought his way, which consists of him making statements and then defending them with lofty silence, sniping down her sallies with looks of high disdain. It was the old fight: his tiredness, her boredom; his remoteness, her need for society; his growing coldness, her ticking ovaries.
She opens the chati mags to the full colour centre spreads. Perfect courtships; glossy weddings; centrefold divorces. Krishan sits in the tailor-position, toes clasped in his hands.
“This is Sonia Shetty, she plays Ashu Kumar. She was married to Lal Darfan—in real life, not in Town and Country —but they divorced back in the spring. I was really surprised about that, everyone thought they were together forever, but she’s been seen around with Roni Jhutti. She was at the premiere of Prem Das, in a lovely silver dress, so I think it’s only a matter of time before we get an announcement. Of course, Lal Darfan’s been saying all kinds of things about her, that she is slack and a disgrace. Isn’t it strange how actors can be nothing like their characters in Town and Country? It’s quite changed the way I think about Dr. Prekash.”
Krishan flips the thick, shiny pages, aromatic with petrochemicals.
“But they aren’t real, either,” he says. “This woman wasn’t married to anyone in real life, she wasn’t at any premiere with any actor. They’re just software that believes it’s another kind of software.”
“Oh, I know that,” Parvati says. “No one believes they’re real people. Celebrity has never been about what’s real. But it’s nice to pretend. It’s like having another story on top of Town and Country, but one that’s much more like the way we live.”
Krishan rocks gently.
“Forgive me, but do you miss your family very much?” Parvati looks up from her chati glamshots. “Why do you ask?”
“It just strikes me that you treat unreal people like family. You care about their relationships, their ups and downs, their lives, if you can call them that.”
Parvati pulls her dupatta over her head to protect it from the high sun.
“I think about my family, my mother every day. Oh, I wouldn’t go back, not for a moment, but I thought with so many people, so much going on, to be in the capital, I would have a hundred worlds to move through. But it is easier to be invisible than it ever was in Kotkhai. I could disappear completely here.”
“Kotkhai, where is that?” Krishan asks. Above him aircraft contrails merge and tangle, spyship and killer, hunting each other ten kilometres above Varanasi.
“In Kishanganj District, in Bihar. You have just made me realise a strange thing, Mr. Kudrati. I mail my mother every day and she tells me about her health and how Rohini and Sushil and the boys are and all the people I know from Kotkhai, but she never tells me about Kotkhai.”
So she tells him of Kotkhai, for in telling she tells herself. She can go back to clutches of cracked mud-brick houses gathered around the tanks and pumps; she can walk again down the gently sloping main street of shops and corrugated iron awnings sheltering the stonecutters’ workshops. This was the men’s world, of drinking tea and listening to the radio and arguing politics. The women’s world was in the fields, at the pump and the tanks, for water was the women’s element, and the school where the new teacher Mrs. Jaitly from the city ran evening classes and discussion groups and a micro—credit union funded on egg money.
Then it changed. Trucks from Ray Power came and poured out men who put up a tent village so that for a month there were two Kotkhais as they built their wind turbines and solar panels and biomass generators and gradually webbed every house and shop and holy place together with sagging cables. Sukrit the battery seller cursed them that they had put a good man out of business and a good daughter to prostitution.
“We are part of the world now,” Mrs. Jaitly had told her women at the evening group. “Our web of cables connects to another web, connects to a greater web, connects to a web across the whole world.”
But old India was dying, Nehru’s dream bursting at the seams under the pressure of ethnic and cultural division and an environment sagging beneath a billion and a half humans. Kotkhai prided itself that its backwardness and isolation would insulate it from Diljit Rana’s idiosyncratic mix of Hinduism and future vision. But the men were talking at the dhaba, reading out columns from the evening news about National Armies and armed militias and lightning raids to seize and hold a fistful of sand-poor villages like Kotkhai in the grab for national territory. Jai Bharat! The young men went first. Parvati had seen how her father watched them leave on the country bus. S.J. Sadurbhai had never forgiven his wife for only delivering him daughters. He daily envied the middle classes who could afford to choose the sex of their children. They were building a strong nation, not weak and womanly as old India had been, bickering herself to death. It was almost a relief in the Sadurbhai house when he announced that he and his apprentice Gurpal from the garage were driving off to the war. A good war. A man’s war. They drove off and in all Kotkhai there were only two casualties, those two, killed in the truck they were driving by an aeai attack helicopter that could not tell friend from foe. A man’s war, a man’s death.
Three weeks later a nation was born and war replaced with soap. Within a month of the proclamation of new Bharat, more men brought more cables, fibre-optic cables, down which came news and gupshup and soap. Teacher Jaitly railed against Town and Country as mind-gelling propaganda promulgated by the state to stifle real political debate, but week by week her classes dwindled, woman by woman, until in the end she returned to the city, defeated by the affairs of the Prekashs and Ranjans. The new village gathering place was around the state-supplied widescreen. Parvati grew to womanhood in the light of Town and Country. From it she learned all the skills needed to become the perfect wife. Within six months Parvati was in Varanasi receiving the final social lacquer that would get her into every best party and durbar on the loop. A half-year later, at a wedding of some cousin of a cousin, she caught a whisper from her second cousin once-removed Deepti, and looked where the whisper pointed, across the lantern-lit gardens, through the glowing awning to the thin, scholarly looking man trying not to be seen looking at her. She remembers that the tree under which he stood was hung with tiny wicker birdcages containing candles. She imagined him haloed in stars.
A further six months and the arrangements were complete, the dowry lodged in Parvati’s mother’s grameen account and a taxi booked to carry Parvati’s few things to the new penthouse flat in the heart of great Varanasi. Except that the things looked like orphans in the cedar-lined closets and penthouse it might be but everyone was now moving out of that dirty, crowded, noisy Kashi to the green soft Cantonment and the thin, scholarly man cloaked with stars was only a policeman. But with a word or a wave of her hand the Prekashs and Ranjans would be there, round to call, who were as happy in Kotkhai as Varanasi, who knew neither snobbery nor caste and whose doings and scandals were always interesting.